Look I'm only a small home business user but this is the only piece of software (network monitoring) I've enjoyed using for a while. In saying that I would contribute/pay for greater features if that's what it took. But it would depend on what kind of 'Bang for Buck' I was getting for the feature set I was paying for. I'm not against paying anything just as long as it ment fast/quicker development, count me in. I love and assist with open source projects but sometimes you get what you pay for!!
-----Original Message----- From: observium-bounces@observium.org [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong Sent: Tuesday, 16 April 2013 8:28 AM To: Observium Network Observation System Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Enterprise/Pro licensing
On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:36:24 +0200, Job Snijders job.snijders@atrato.com wrote:
Hi,
Have you calculated how many dollars you need per year? Going from there and calculating backwards might be good strategy. You must have some
stats
from the svn repo how many unique IPs do 'svn up'. Are you today getting
a
lot of requests for a few hours of consultancy on an observium installation?
There are approximately 3,500 live installations over the past 14 days.
Absolute minimum viable revenue to do Observium full-time would be ~$15k/a. For this I'd be able to pay for food, internet and electricity for laptop :)
We get a few requests per year for support and custom development, no one ever actually pays for anything.
Earlier a remark was made that complicated licensing schemes suck, something like "costs 2500 euro per year boss - flat" is appealing, also
it
will make your license enforcement much simpler, as you don't have to do weird things with the code so people don't add more than X ports or X devices. A nice aspect of observium is that most people can easily tweak/finetune some parts of the code for their particular environment, binary blob distributions would take that away.
That isn't actually a benefit IMO. Any modification of the code makes updates pretty difficult.
The downsides of the ioncubed blob is that it's really difficult to deliver timely updates the way we do with SVN. Similarly any attempt to split the codebase would have this problem too. It's an absolute nightmare to manage two trains of the same code.
We likely wouldn't do anything to the code to stop people doing things, we'd rely on them not wanting to be doing illegal stuff at work.
In terms of separating features, I was thinking of doing that by having a separate repository of poller modules for the 'enterprise' features, which were automatically included when available.
Features for paying customers could be:
- heavier voting rights (paying customers priortize the todo queue)
- support response within X business hours
- X hours of remote support (more hours @ discounted rate)
- decent alerting
- API to intergrate observium with existing backend/CMDB (API to add,
delete & report on devices/ports)
Yup, this is what I was thinking of.
The alternative, of course, is to just cease free development and take the whole thing commercial.
This would be our least favoured option, but 100 paying customers are better than 3500 freeloaders :)
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